PTC is joining with many parent groups and school boards to fight this direct assault on local control and democracy.
Pastors for Texas Children is a staunch ally of public schools and of separation of church and state. They have vigorously fought vouchers and now they are fighting an all-out attempt by the yet the aggressive charter industry to open wherever they want, without the approval of local elected officials. The lobbyists also want to slash the state board of education’s power to veto new charters.
PTC is working with parent groups and other activists to stop this direct assault on local control and democracy.
PASTORS FOR TEXAS CHILDREN
SB 28 HEARING IN HOUSE COMMITTEE TOMORROW
The public education advocacy community–which includes YOU–has had some great success despite this being a very difficult legislative session.
First of all, one piece of legislation that PTC is hoping to see made into law is the “community schools bill.” HB 81 by Eddie Rodriguez would give struggling schools the ability to partner with the community to improve educational outcomes for their students. HB 81 unanimously passed out of the House Public Education committee recently.
Second, you might have heard about the House of Representative’s budget debate this past Thursday. The House sent a clear message to us: they want to support public education. There were two big ways they did this on Thursday:
- They voted to ensure the legislature will appropriate the $18 billion in federal relief money to public schools, and to only spend that money on public schools.
- They overwhelmingly voted down a private schools voucher amendment.
Job well done, faithful servants! This is a huge celebration, but we still have work to do…
Tell the House Public Education Committee to reject unlimited charter school expansion.
Tomorrow, April 27, the House Public Education Committee will meet to consider SB 28. This bill makes it easier for the State Board of Education to approve new charter applications, and makes it easier for charter schools to locate anywhere they want without restriction.
SB 28 affords special privileges to charter schools. It unfairly disadvantages smaller cities from zoning restrictions to charter schools. And it prohibits school districts from providing information to the public about the impact of a new charter school.
SB 28 also changes the process for State Board of Education approval of a new charter school.Previously the SBOE was able to veto the commissioner of education’s approval of new charter school applications with a simple majority. SB 28 would require a larger majority of 3/5, or nine out of 15 members to veto. With a State Board of Education who is usually split down the middle on charter schools, this would make it significantly harder for the board to use their veto power. The SBOE has not abused this power; in fact, many public education advocates would like to see them use it more often. Since holding this privilege, the SBOE has only vetoed seven new charter school applications in eight years.
Help us oppose this bill! Please call the members of the House Public Education committee
Diane Ravitch's blog 
last evening, I spent over an hour at my daughter’s school listening to a lawyer for her school system explain to a room full of people how to keep records for the various organizations that help fund everything from sports to choir (that was me). The rules were as arcane as they were numerous, all meant to keep unscrupulous individuals from raiding the pantry containing the funds for various extra curriculars.
I could not help but think that the same politicians who had made these laws I was supposed to understand were allowing state money to go to charter schools pretty much without constraint.
The charter lobby funded by biased billionaires continues to steamroll local control and governance. They will continue to dismantle public education brick by brick unless we the people stop them. Public schools in Texas are in dire need of parent and social justice activists to contain the charter lobby’s nefarious influence. Privatizers always seek to expand their territory unless people pressure policymakers to stop them. Expansion has little to do with need most of the time. I commend the Pastors for Texas Children for all their efforts on behalf of the young people of Texas.
This is an interesting charter scandal because The Mind Trust and Indianapolis privatization of public schools is a top tier project for the national ed reform “movement”:
“Calling him “brilliant” at working with students, the influential charter incubator The Mind Trust gave Al-Nasir a two-year, $800,000 fellowship last summer to develop Stemnasium Science Math Engineering Middle School.
But a Chalkbeat investigation found that the rosy charter pitch painted over troubling details — lawsuits, financial troubles, questionable academic credentials — that escaped notice by city charter officials and The Mind Trust.”
Indianapolis is promoted by the ed reform echo chamber as the best example of successful privatization, and they didn’t even do the slightest due diligence on this guy- they swallowed everything he told them.
“The case raises questions of transparency and accountability in the chartering process in Indianapolis, where a robust charter school scene has reshaped education over the past two decades.”
“Rosy charter pitch” really describes most the work of ed reformers- they’re in the rosy charter pitch business.
“painted over.” That is exactly what has happened year upon year
Just astonishing:
“Without the inquiries from Chalkbeat, it’s unclear whether Al-Nasir’s money troubles or unsubstantiated educational claims would have come to light. The Indianapolis mayor’s office, which oversees more than 40 charter schools in the city, is often named among the strongest charter authorizers in the nation. But its director acknowledged that officials don’t vet new applicants’ financial histories or even run a simple free search on a public database of court records that would reveal lawsuits.”
They do no vetting at all. They don’t even check resumes to verify college diplomas.
This is supposedly the absolute best ed reform experiment in the country- the gold standard – and they do no oversight or due diligence when they allocate public funding for a charter school.
https://in.chalkbeat.org/2021/4/23/22398328/stemnasium-indianapolis-charter-school-application
In 2018, the Council for American Private Education, located in D.C., got a new director from the state of Kansas (a Koch colony). The new director, who described his D.C. position as, “advocacy work for education on the larger stage of the federal government”, described the successes of his prior job (1) the 2014 passage of Kansas’ first school choice law, btw-the Koch’s Gov. Brownback was in office at the time (2) protection of faith-based adoption providers which was described as being “won with the bare minimum of 63 votes” and (3) pro-life laws. The director’s accomplishments occurred during his tenure as the Director of the Kansas Catholic Conference. (“Our Man in Topeka”, The Leaven, 6-22-2018)
Following up as director of the Kansas Catholic Conference was state GOP Representative Chuck Weber, who resigned from his elected position to lead the Kansas Catholic Conference.
Bishop Naumann of Kansas, with whom the aforementioned Conference Director worked from 2008-2018, was recently in the news for his support of a Catholic school’s decision not to enroll the child of a non-Catholic same sex married couple. Part of Naumann’s stated opposition to the school’s inclusion of the child was based on an argument about, “…help(ing) students to understand the meaning and purpose of their sexuality.”
Bishop Nauman was the subject of a Catholic Vote article, “Pro-life Catholics defend Bishop from ‘cancel culture’ “, 3-28-2021. The article praised a petition in support of Naumann’s statement that Joe Biden should stop receiving communion and calling himself a devout Catholic if he continues to support abortion. The same article views an activity whose aim was to make prejudice against homosexuality socially unacceptable as, “canceling Christians who exercise their conscience rights to stand against the secular left.”
A nation that is dependent on an underfunded, patchwork of part-time volunteer activists who believe in women and gay rights and who believe in goods held in common for the community, needs help fighting a conservative religious stronghold. American democracy needs heroes to openly call out the conservative religious networks and their intersection with the agenda of despots and politically powerful right wing business.
Godspeed Pastors for Texas children.
Various media report that Seth Andrew, founder of a well-known charter school network in New York, has been arrested. The allegations focus on a source of money related to his $2.3 mil. apartment. Btw- he was an Obama WH advisor in the Dept. of Ed.
A commenter at this blog wrote a couple of years ago about Seth in relation to his job with Bill Gates and Zuck’s Bridge International Academies.
Andrew’s wife, Lana Zak, joined CBS in 2020 as a news anchor.
If public schools want to catch a break, they won’t find it at New York news networks, with Obama’s former education advisors, nor with Bill Gates’ former employees— for obvious reasons.
You are right. Seth Andrew, founder of Democracy Prep charter chain, “borrowed” $218,000 from the chain’s bank account in 2019, although he left the chain to work in the Obama administration in 2013.
He was arrested and charged by federal officials with wire fraud, money laundering, and making false statements to a bank.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/27/politics/seth-andrew-charter-schools/index.html
The zoning thing made me hot under the collar, so I googled “sb28 texas zoning restrictions for charter schools;” first hit got me a Bill Analysis expressing the “Author’s/ Sponsor’s Statement of Interest.” Here’s what jumped out: in the intro justifying the bill, they whine about locals refusing to waive for charter schools such things as the requirement for ‘large areas of greenspace’ in densely-populated urbs (which apparently are required for traditional publics). Those darn locals want space for schoolkids to run around in—hey, we the state want to put charters in strip-malls and office-bldgs: let the kids play in the parking lot [or in a ballpit indoors]! Bad enough. But then a few lines down they say all they want is “equal treatment under local zoning and land use ordinances…” The main ‘equal treatment’ they want (expressed elsewhere) is exemption from fees enjoyed by traditional publics. When it comes to ‘land use’ they want special treatment.
Frankly the very idea that the state could locate a charter school in your district without consulting (& over the objection of) the local supt/ Bd of Ed—much less override local zoning reqts for schools—would never float in NJ. We are often criticized for our local fiefdoms, and only share services with adjoining towns when our backs are to the wall, resulting no doubt in higher costs all around (at least in our most densely-populated areas). But even the more red-voting rural-ish S NJans cling tight to local control. A cultural thing, I guess.
The weird thing is, I was raised in rock-ribbed conservative-Republican upstate-NY, where even the poorer areas have not relinquished tightly-held local control to this day. What is it about all these supposedly conservative-Rep denizens of South, SW, even Midwest who give away local control in exchange for pretty-talk from the state about ‘school choice,’ ‘religious freedom,’ etc?
That’s the great mystery in many of the “reform” initiatives. They expunge local control. Since when were Texans and Floridians and others willing to do that?
The New York Times just went full bore conservative in this morning’s top news feed article titled “a bipartisan school movement”:
Republicans sometimes put more emphasis on school accountability, while Democrats assume — incorrectly — that adequate funding ensures high quality.
The word “incorrectly” is linked to this horrible article:
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/april-2004/tough-lesson-more-money-doesnt-help-schools-accountability-does?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210428&instance_id=29832&nl=the-morning®i_id=157550375&segment_id=56650&te=1&user_id=c455c62eebdf03229865ec3595f36e96
It gets to it’s conclusion that we aren’t getting much bang for our buck by cherry picking a bunch of districts to illustrate the lack of correlation between test scores and school funding.
Can’t believe yesterday’s Leonhardt article links to a 17yo analysis—which is backed up with 21yo stats—to support “Democrats assume incorrectly that adequate funding ensures high quality.” His assumption about Democrats’ assumption is wrong anyway!
Thank you, Diane, for once again generously highlighting our work, and to all of you for your great work and witness against the Koch and Devos charter machine. While the blitzkrieg continues down here in Texas, with multiple highly paid charter lobbyists working the House of Representatives, particularly rural representatives who have no charter schools, the public education advocacy community is holding the line so far against SB 28.
We are particularly proud of the Texas Association of School Administrators for mobilizing district superintendents against this awful policy. Their Executive Director, Dr. Kevin Brown, delivered devastating testimony on Thursday before the House Public Education Committee against this bill specifically and charter expansion generally. The chair, Houston Democrat Harold Dutton—a strong charter school proponent and House sponsor of SB 28—offered all the usual thin arguments in fierce rebuttal, which Dr. Brown answered calmly and forcefully.
I offered testimony against the bill also, reporting our urban pastors’ vehement umbrage at a policy that compromises their neighborhood local control, and our rural pastors’ opposition to a policy that diverts funding from their communities, which have no charter schools, to far away cities which are swamped with them. I was the last witness. No questions were asked. They’ve learned not to debate me.
Clearly, the committee is not impressed with this bill. Chairman Dutton adjourned the meeting without a vote on it because he knew it wouldn’t pass. Even if the most egregious portions are cleansed from it, and HPE passes it, the junk will be put back in when it goes to conference committee. Dan Patrick’s Senate is hellbent to privatize public education any way they can. Losing the voucher fight, they have doubled down on charters.
Get well, Diane! We are praying for your increased strength and healing every day!